The Internet provides access to a wide variety of information. For example, digital image files, video and/or audio files, as well as web page resources for particular subjects or particular news articles, are accessible over the Internet. With respect to web page resources, many of these resources are designed to facilitate the performing of particular functions, such as banking, booking hotel reservations, shopping, etc., or to provide structured information, such as on-line encyclopedias, movie databases, etc.
Furthermore, with the advent of tablet computers and smart phones, native applications that facilitate the performance of the same functions facilitated by the use of web page resources are now being provided in large numbers. Additionally, native applications that do not have websites with synchronous content, such as games, are also very popular on tablet computers and smart phones. Accordingly, search systems now also facilitate searching of these native applications.
One process by which search systems gather information for native applications is by accessing “deep links” for the native applications. A deep link is an instruction specifying a particular environment instance of a native application and configured to cause the native application to instantiate the environment instance of the specified native application when selected at a user device. The native application generates the environment instance for display within the native application on a user device.
Once the native application is instantiated, the search system may crawl and index the content provided in the environmental instance. The native application, however, should be fully instantiated before the crawling and indexing operation beings, otherwise some information may not be indexed.